I'm not sure if you find it genuinely surprising that the Hacker News populace is not moved by a device that you not only have to pay rent for, but that also seemingly does not support custom ROMs/firmware.

Besides that, the software that they expect you to pay rent for is a fork of LineageOS/AOSP, but it doesn't seem to mention anywhere on the site whether they donate any of the rent to their upstreams.

Those are fair criticisms, but that's not what I saw mentioned when the thread was young and the comments were at the level of "wait I have to pay for them maintaining the OS??". It seems people have that as a gut reaction even though they have presumably also (on average) been exposed to sentiments pro paying for things that cost money